Brain Structure Shows Who is Most Sensitive to Pain

Everybody feels pain differently, and brain structure may hold the clue to these differences.

In a study published in the current online issue of the journal Pain, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have shown that the brain’s structure is related to how intensely people perceive pain.

“We found that individual differences in the amount of grey matter in certain regions of the brain are related to how sensitive different people are to pain,” said Robert Coghill, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and senior author of the study.